Lady Gaga may be touring with a gargantuan monster, an army of backup dancers and costumes that spit out fireworks, but two other female stars need to take the live pop show support to its roots. On July 23rd, Robyn and Kelis will hit the route for a special six-date tour dubbed "All Hearts" and the couple are planning to turn theaters and larger-scale venues into sweaty, after-hours clubs.
"This spell is more about getting to mass to dance than impressing them with big muscles and fire machines," Robyn says.
This class has seen a revival in dance music, from LCD Soundsystem's disco-flavored indie grooves to David Guetta's string of techno-flavored hits like Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" and the Akon-assisted "Sexy Bitch." Robyn's "Dancing on My Own" has been riding the top of the Billboard Dance charts for the final eight weeks while Kelis, whose new record Flesh Tone finds her moving out from R&B to more Euro-pop flavored beats, has been scoring some of the best reviews of her career. The two, who are both signed underneath the Interscope Records umbrella, decided to hit the route out of a common respect for each other's music. "Honestly, I know her album and I figured she's going on tour and I want to go on tour and we talked about it," says Kelis. "It was merely natural."
The tour kicks off in only 4 years but Kelis and Robyn aren't going dotty with pre-show preparations. Kelis still hasn't quite hammered down her set list, which will admit a more thumping, technofied version of her breakout hit "Milkshake." "I've been doing this for a while," she says. "It's not brain surgery. I only go with what I feel." Robyn, meanwhile, has been focusing on arrangements instead of elaborate stage production by rehearsing in her Stockholm hometown with her band, which includes two drummers and two keyboardists. "[My set] will be but me and them," she says, adding that she'll be debuting new tunes from her forthcoming Body Talk Pt. 2, which is due out after this year. "It's actually straightforward."
The duo's streamlined plans for their shows lead to their touring habits. Kelis and Robyn's pre-show rituals don't admit any over-the-top rider requests or diva-like behavior. Robyn preps for the present by massaging her tongue, a joke she learned from her Swedish vocal coach. "I haven't lost my part in 10 years," she says. Kelis, on the other hand, prefers to bite on ginger. "It works as a lozenge type of thing," she says. "It cuts off all the excess nonsense in there."
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